The Buddha Machine

What looks like a small transistor radio, complete with two AA batteries, turns out to be an ambient machine programmed with nine continuous loops.

Instead of explaining the Buddha Machine, I wish I could just persuade you to drop the cash and order one, so you can figure it out on your own. Giving you my impressions will ruin the fun, in the same way that you don't give kids a review of a toy-- you just hand it over and let them start playing. When mine came in the mail, opening the box gave me a kind of Christmas morning rush and a flash of "what is this thing?" It's packaged in a small cardboard box printed with Chinese lettering around an image of a street scene. Inside you'll find what looks like a small transistor radio, plus two AA batteries (also Chinese).

Switch it on, and a soft, ambient loop starts to crackle through the tiny, cheap speaker built into the device. You can adjust the volume dial, or switch between the nine short loops programmed into the Buddha Machine-- and then you set it down and leave it alone. I've left it playing hours at a time while I sit at my desk, and I could even picture installing these around my house, like low budget installation art.

But I don't want to get hung up on its artistry, because most important of all, it's also an object. The minute I opened the box, I wanted to hold it in my hand, and play with the switches, and carry it around with me. It has an output jack, but it's much more fun to listen to its cheap built-in speaker: at low volumes, the loops are placid, fitting into the corner of your ear, but turn up the dial or press it to your ear and you hear hundreds of nuances and crackles of static. And best of all, the music never stops. Sure, you can listen to a minimalist CD and imagine how it would feel to hear it for days on end, but the Buddha Machine lets you try it: There's no 80-minute limit, and the batteries will go for hours. Psychologically, it makes a big difference when you aren't waiting for the music to fade out.

The nine loops are suggestive, but they're deliberately not engaging. A piece like Ekkehard Ehlers' "Plays John Cassavetes 2" makes you feel like you could hear it repeat forever, but in practice it needs to wrap itself up and end before we can get tired of it. The loops on the Buddha Machine don't shift or change over time, although you may be tricked into believing that they do, and a couple of loops that almost have hooks actually made me anxious, as I realized that I was waiting for them to move on. (The ninth loop, which is only two seconds long, is too fast and abrupt and probably could have been cut.)

More than anything, the Buddha Machine is a great way to study ambient music. It's built to produce background music, but as you treat it more functionally, you might question whether it's "art." What's the point of music that doesn't move forward? Can something this boundless and utilitarian meet the same criteria as an album, like Brian Eno's Discreet Music, where the system was designed to run forever but strategically isn't allowed to? You don't have to think about these issues-- or about anything at all-- but you'd be missing out on part of the fun.

Some people will call this a novelty, but it's not: It's a toy. Most of us are drawn to little gadgets that make music; we love to pick them up and fiddle with the switches, and play with them, and figure out how they work. Along the way we're testing and stretching the ways we experience and consume music. The Buddha Machine isn't the first self-contained music maker to sell as a work of electronic art, but it is an almost perfectly-realized example. And I can't stop playing with it.